Bots are all the hype. , an active user and a bot uber-guru, pushed us to build one for ages. One day we finally felt like it: we wanted to test the waters with a simple bot. Chris Messina Refind Why? Refind is the home for the best links on the web. People use it to discover, save, and read what’s really worth their attention. A bot could send the user a digest of the top 3 links as a daily morning briefing — on the platform and device she hangs out on. Specs for V1 The user can subscribe to a few topics: Design, UX, Programming, etc. Every day, the bot sends the top 3 links — curated by our community of hipsters, hackers, and hustlers — at 8AM (local time). The user could change frequency: daily, three times a week, weekly. Zero to bot Within a few hours, we had the . Here’s a quick rundown of our steps in case you’re new to bots and want to build one yourself: bot ready Wrote down (business) goals in a Google Doc. Read a few articles about bots in general, from this list: https://refind.com/chrismessina?q=bots Jotted down a few questions / potential show stoppers (e.g., can a bot send a message to the user days after the first interaction?). Played with a few bots (first time we ever interacted with a chatbot): MessinaBot, CNN, WSJ, TechCrunch. Quickly researched platforms: FB Messenger, Slack, iMessage, … Decided to start with FB Messenger. Most questions had been answered by now (e.g., on FB, you can send after 24h with the ). page_messaging_subscription Build from scratch or use a developer tool? Scanned FB platform docs, researched a few developer tools. Decided to go with . Chatfuel Created a Hello World bot (that was easy!). Sketched the bot in a Google Doc: onboarding, flow, key messages. Question: What’s the interface with Refind? API? Found that RSS is probably the simplest interface to start with. Found the TechCrunch template on Chatfuel. Created a new bot using the TechCrunch template on Chatfuel. Created . RSS feeds for popular topics Used the to validate our feeds. W3C validator Used the endpoints in the bot. Adapted messages. Published the bot. Tested one day later: The bot came back to us — on time at 8 AM local — with our digest of top 3 links. Cool! Made some minor tweaks, improved the flow. Wrote this post. Give it a try (no Refind account required) https://m.me/refindcom What’s next? Obviously, this is a very simple bot. If it becomes popular, we’ll extend it with features to save links to Refind or to deal with your reading list. Send us feedback: hello@refind.com! P.S. As a side effect, we also took the first steps towards opening up Refind for developers: https://refind.com/developers P.P.S. Can you please ? :) build a Refind bot for Slack
